My Experience at CD Summit & Jenkins Days in Boston

Hi, my name is Mary Smith-Gagnon. I received a free ticket from Women Who Code, to attend the CD Summit & Jenkins Days in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 5th and 6th, 2016. It was a conference on Continuous Delivery and on the product Jenkins, which is used for Continuous Delivery. I attended an excellent seminar called “Essential DevOps.” It was all about DevOps, what it is and isn’t. It was extremely informative.

At my company, we have a DevOps team, but DevOps goes beyond just being a team. It is also a culture. DevOps is defined by Wikipedia as “A cultural and professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and IT operations professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.” DevOps is not a title, team, tool, only culture, only automation or the Wild West.

The presenter was Jayne Groll from the DevOps Institute. She discussed the Outcome Economy which is a “shift from competing by selling products and services to competing by selling measurable results important to the customer. It’s an economy where buyers are looking to buy an outcome and the sellers are selling a promise of an outcome” (Alan Alter, Accenture). It was very enlightening. It gave me a very different perspective on my IT and Ops teams.

There we demonstrations for products that contribute to the “pipeline” of continuous delivery. From automated test software, performance testing software to continuous integration and development software. The main sponsor of the event was Jenkins and Cloudbees which is Jenkins at an enterprise level. I would definitely recommend this conference to any software developer. It was a real eye opener!